A First Examination of Aphasia Using Pupillometry

Abstract

We use pupillometry to examine the time-course of sentence processing in aphasia, perhaps the first study to do so. By time-locking pupillary responses to stimulus presentation, we are able to collect a continuous measure of processing load in a participant-friendly and efficient manner. In this first proof-of-concept effort, we manipulate the thematic fit that occurs between a verb and its arguments. We find that aphasic patients&rsquo; pupillary responses are similar to those of their age matched controls as well as healthy college age students, whereby pupil size increases when thematic fit is violated.